62 research outputs found
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The Value of Verse: Storytelling as Accounting in Froissart’s Dit du florin
The present article seeks to show that the façade of modesty and self-criticism of the Dit du florin is more superficial than has been realized. Couched in a frame in which Froissart appears to rebuke himself while praising his patrons is in fact a subtle demonstration of the power of the writer, who, through his stories (contes), does the real accounting (compte), determining the worth of various patrons, who may even be counts (comtes) such as Gaston Phébus, count of Foix. On several occasions (vv. 107-08, 276-77, 331-32, 381-82), Froissart invites readers to contemplate the link between these three homophones—not always orthographically distinct in Middle French—suggesting that the writer wields more influence when it comes to the assessment of value than the wealthy patrons whose image he can manipulate at will. While Zink offers a reading of the coin in the Dit du florin as a symbol of time and memory, I will argue that it might be understood equally well as a double of the written text
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The Vernacular Panther: Encyclopedism, Citation and French Authority in Nicole de Margival's Dit de la panthere
Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthere (ca. 1290–1328) has long been read as a poorly written and unoriginal composition. Bernard Ribemont, the text’s most recent editor, describes its rhetorical construction as boring and its poet as laborious. Anne Berthelot, another recent critic, goes
so far as to draw a parallel between the protagonist’s pusillanimity and Nicole de Margival’s constant recourse to the words and authority of others. The aim of this article is not to demonstrate the originality of the Panthere but rather to show that its borrowings (some of which I aim to
identify for the first time) are not all of the same variety. While explicitly acknowledged French authors and texts are used to align the Panthere with the coeval encyclopedic tradition that was flourishing in Italy and France, two unrecognized Italian sources—Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto (1280) and Dante Alighieri’s De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1302–5)—are silently incorporated
into the Panthere. Whereas the texts of French ‘‘authors’’ are treated as sources of knowledge that can be mined and put back into circulation via citation and quotation, Nicole’s Italian sources are evacuated of their epistemic content, partially through the effacement of the subject positions
of their authors. This strategy of authorizing French texts and deauthorizing Italian ones suggests that the Dit de la panthere had stakes in the promotion and illustration of French vernacular authority
French Troubadours: Assimilating Occitan Literature in Northern France (1200-1400)
French Troubadours explores the reception of Occitan lyric in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is, in the period corresponding to the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) and its aftermath, which witnessed France's annexation of the majority of Occitania. Surveying the corpus of French romances that quote Occitan song (Part I) and French songbooks that also contain Occitan lyrics (Part II), it shows how Occitan poems--from the very beginning of their French reception--were subtly incorporated into the French canon by way of imitation, compilation with French texts, and adaptation to the French sound system.
Chapter 1, on Jean Renart's Roman de la rose, shows how the troubadours are collapsed into a set of francophone lyrics, which are enjoyed not in France but by the Holy Roman Emperor. French-language lyric, and other forms of French culture, are presented as the degré zéro of culture in the German Empire, while Germanic languages are treated as foreign. In Chapter 2, I turn to Gerbert de Montreuil's Roman de la violette, which, like Renart's Rose, appropriates troubadour lyrics linguistically, and--in one instance--also associates them with the Holy Roman Empire. Here, however, the Holy Roman Empire is not a neutral cadre, but a negative space. Chapter 3, devoted to Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour, shows how Richard obscures the first-person language and rhyme of the troubadour poems he quotes.
In Part II, I turn to the set of French songbooks that transmit Occitan lyric. A study of compilation patterns reveals that, rather than being transmitted in a separate section of songbooks, Occitan poems--which are often Gallicized--are almost always interspersed with French lyrics. Consequently, a medieval reader who encountered the troubadours only in French transmission would have little chance of recognizing their cultural specificity. In Chapter 5, I explore the "pseudo-Occitan" corpus, which comprises pieces that contain Occitan phonological coloring but were probably composed by francophones. I show that these pieces occur primarily in a lower register. This trend fictionally repositions Occitan lyric as both "primitive" and--by extension--as anterior to French lyric
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Review Essay, Ulrich Molk, ed. Les Debuts d'une theorie litteraire en France: Anthologie critique
Review of Ulrich Molk, ed. Les Debuts d'une theorie litteraire en France: Anthologie critiqu
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Review Essay, Philippe de Remi, La Manekine, ed. and trans. Marie-Madeleine Castellani
Review of Philippe de Remi, La Manekine, ed. and trans. Marie-Madeleine Castellan
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